Thursday, January 12, 2012

Timex Ironman Watch Band Hack

I wear a Timex Ironman watch most of the time that I'm not at work. In general, I love the watch. Its useful for managing the amount of time you spend on a task, timing cooking meals on the trail, distance estimation, alarms, and, and, and...

Not good - Making Flippy Floppy

The bands that Timex decided to use on their newer watches aren't very popular with me, however. I can no longer use those velcro straps (The Band) and getting a replacement band requires that you buy Timex brand gear. Its particularly annoying when the failure point is something as simple as the band keeper. Because I'm a salty, stubborn old bastard I spend my valuable time trying to fix it instead of giving in as a victim of their design for failure revenue strategy.

Nicht Gut - Der Gorilla klappen rund

My first repair was a crude replacement made out of Gorilla Tape. As an aside, if you're not familiar with this tape, you should be. Its the Chuck Norris of duct tape. This replacement only gets a 4 out of 10 because it holds the band in place at first but it slides around eventually letting the band flop around.

O-rings are for champions

The next (and current) solution holds much more promise and doesn't look quite so ghetto. I had a perfectly sized o-ring in my gear closet that pops right on, holds the band in place and so far stays in place. Score? 11 of 10! If this doesn't work, I think I'll ask one of my less evolved cycling buddies that ride skinny tires to donate a section of inner tube.

So, this is what you get when I have copious amounts of spare time from spinal surgery combined with extreme sleep deprivation & over-powered pain meds. Do you have any other clever ideas?

6 comments:

See now...I prefer a Kavu velcro band but I'll be damned if I can find a watch now with altimeter/barometer functions that doesn't use those stupid large bands like Suunto or Casio. I hate normal bands.

I was hoping for the classic "sad" hand in the first set, "happier" hand in the second, and JAZZ HAND in the third. ;) Good fix. I've found O rings are great to hold all sorts of gear to all sorts of things